Tag Archives: Thomas Glavinic

February is – for sure – my least favourite month of the year. Even though two close friends have their birthdays in February. Carnival season doesn’t mean anything to me. The long winter is tiring me and in February, it’s always the worst. Since October, the weather in Berlin has been constantly grey, chilly or cold, rainy or hazy; I’ve been wearing a jacket that looks like a duvet, making me look like the Michelin-Man. I’ve had five colds and I haven’t recovered from the last yet. So, February in Germany is a mess.

However, it was touching to see people, deficient in vitamin D, crawling out of theirs burrows as soon as the first rays of sun come out. You can really feel their and your own longing for light, spring and warmth. The sun blinds you, you quint your eyes, it tickles your face and for a moment, you blindly gaze into the sun with your eyes closed – until the S-Bahn comes or the next best cloud is pushed across the sun.

But a month of bad weather and bad health gives you enough time to read. In February, I finished Thomas Glavinic’s “Die Arbeit der Nacht” (Englisch title is “Night Work”) and after this demanding novel, I chose only entertaining and light reading. When I say “light”, I don’t mean shallow. I think it’s an art in itself to write a book that makes its reader turn pages, laugh out loud and is still melancholic and observant, moving you. Very few books can do that to me. 80% of what lies around at Hugendubel, just makes me choke. But with these three books, it was different. I’d recommend them especially as presents. Almost everyone who read those three books enjoyed them… Maybe it’s because the books are all in a way simple, but nevertheless observe childhood, family and everyday topics realistically, not through rose-tinted glasses.

But, enough of complaining about bad weather and cheap tricks: here’s what I read in February… [Sorry, the first review is, for whatever reason, in English, even though I read the book in German and Thomas Glavinic is Autrian. Just scroll down to the next two reviews, I switched back to German there. You find more on language in the “About”.]

1. Thomas Glavinic: Night work

On Thomas Glavinc’s “Night work”, I almost broke a tooth. Generally, I consider myself a quite a persistent reader. I normally don’t put aside books which seem taxing to me. In case of “Night work” yet, I was more than once on the verge of returning it to my mother who had lent it to me. It was hard to stick to it, but I assume, that was part of Glavinic’s plan.

However, the novel’s scenario is a gripping one. It resembles a constellation you may know from nightmares or daydreaming: Jonas, 35 years old, male, furniture salesman, with a girlfriend called Marie, wakes up one day, goes to the bus stop, waits for the bus a little too long – and finds the world empty. No cars, no radio, TV, no Internet, no one picks up the phone. Not even birds chirping or flies buzzing. Jonas comes to realize he’s the last living creature on earth.

This setting reminded me of my beloved “The Wall” (“Die Wand by the Austrian author Marlen Haushofer from 1963): What would it be like to be the last human on earth? Glavinic radicalizes this experiment as all animals are gone from Jonas’ world.

At first, Jonas looks for people, keeps driving around Vienna, searching for others and the solution to his strange situation. To improve his chances of tracing down someone, he installs cameras around the city. Then, he starts looking for answers within himself. He begins recording his sleeping self, who seems to be doing disturbing actions at night: Jonas wakes up and a knife is stuck in his bedroom wall. Or: Jonas decides to look for Marie, who is supposed to be in England with relatives. He drives 700 miles, and then takes a rest, only to find out that his sleeping self sabotaged his plans and drove back the entire distance. Of course, the reader desperately wants to find out what happened to the rest of the earth’s population and who will win: Jonas or the sleeper.

“Who am I if nobody is watching me?”

Glavinic doesn’t answer our questions. Maybe he can’t solve the experiment he set up himself. What is brilliant about Glavinic’s writing is ability to manipulate and unsettle the reader. Glavinic forces you to deal with the same insecurities Jonas has to face. So, the reader keeps wondering: “Did the narrator tell me that Jonas stopped and looked into the trunk’s car? Or am I only making this up?” I was constantly leafing backward and forward through the pages to find out whether I was right about what had just happened. The story confronts the reader with big and yes, philosophical questions: “Who am I if nobody is watching me?” or “What do things do, if nobody is there watching them? Do they change positions? Alter their looks?”

Call me simplistic, but I thought Glavinic should have delivered more hints to what happened to Jonas. Now, it just seems to me like an experiment which the author lost his interest in. But maybe I just missed something while I was trying to read too carefully. Just like it happens to Jonas all the time…